Petrol Girls have released another acerbic and insightful new track from forthcoming album Baby. Recorded at Middle Farm Studios with producer Pete Miles to tape, the LP is set for release June 24th via Hassle Records. It opens with 28 seconds of noise (made from a mash of sounds on the record) before launching into “Preachers” – a song that sets the tone for the rest of the album both sentimentally and musically. “There’s a lot of preachers here but I don’t see no saints,”Aldridge sings through a smirk you can practically hear. “Lot of fingers pointing, palms sweating under red paint…” The self-aggrandizing nature of call-out culture and moral one-upmanship is put on blast from start to finish with lyrics like “feeling dead important in the comments,”while a post-punk instrumental veers between angular riffs and a power chord chorus. During the writing process, guitarist Joe York became interested in “minimalism and madness,” taking influence from everything from electronic music and hip hop to New Wave bands like Talking Heads in terms of groove, repetition and playfulness – all of which is on display on “Preachers.”
“We wanted to make sure the first track was one that showed this different musical direction, because as well as moving away from sanctimoniousness, politically and vocally, we also wanted to make the music more stripped back and fun,” Aldridge explains. This is one reason why cheekier tracks like the proudly pro-choice single “Baby, I Had An Abortion” and the unceremoniously titled “Clowns” – built around a guitar riff Aldridge describes as sounding “like the morning after Boomtown” – are front-loaded, easing you in gently before hitting you with tracks like “Fight For Our Lives” (ft. Janey Starling of feminist organization Level Up) and “Violent By Design” which deal with the heavier topics of femicide and police brutality.
